


Reaching Polaris, Kirk/McCoy, R/NC-17

by blcwriter



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-18
Updated: 2009-10-18
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:52:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blcwriter/pseuds/blcwriter





	Reaching Polaris, Kirk/McCoy, R/NC-17

_**Reaching Polaris, Kirk/McCoy, R/NC-17**_  
Written for [](http://stxi-sinfest.livejournal.com/profile)[**stxi_sinfest**](http://stxi-sinfest.livejournal.com/) 4, for the prompt of Joni Mitchell's "Case of You."  Original thread, complete with editing and html fails [here](http://community.livejournal.com/stxi_sinfest/1437.html?thread=133533#t133533).  One-shot.  I listened to [Diana Krall's "Live in Paris" version](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrsc5FeQDs) while writing.

\--

Loving Jim Kirk was fucking impossible. He made it impossible—he resisted all kindness, all attempts at anything that wasn’t unspoken. He wouldn’t discuss anything—ever—and all those damned walls he’d let down just a bit around “Bones” didn’t come down much more—if at all—when they gave in to gravity and fell into bed.

He’d accused Jim of being unfaithful, and Jim had said “I’m as constant as Polaris,” looking wounded—but Leonard had been on a roll.

“Yeah. Distant, shrouded in darkness, something you follow your whole fucking life but never get close to.”

He’d tossed the sweet words of victory—he won this battle, he knew it-- like a gauntlet between them, but Jim hadn’t slapped back—just said “I’m trying, goddamnit,” his voice cracking.

“Try harder,” he’d said, “You may not be fucking anyone else or thinking about it, Jim, but you’re so wrapped up in your own shit that I might as well be in this by myself.” He’d given the gorgeous face-- gorgeous body, brilliant mind, dark, dark soul a once-over—maybe one last time—then said “When you get over yourself, you know where to find me.”

That had been weeks ago, his only interaction with Jim the strictly professional since—he’d taken to avoiding any interactions with Jim, who wore his fucking heart on his sleeve with that stupid brave Captain-y face of his. But he never did come around, tell Leonard what the hell was going on in his head. And now the doctor was in a dark Starbase bar frequented by tramp ships and smugglers that were all the space traffic in this ass end of space, drinking too much whisky all by himself while _Enterprise_ was stuck here for repairs after saving the station from an Orion slaver attack. Jim, of course, had been hurt, leading one of the Security teams in clearing the station of the last of the invaders, and Leonard had done what he’d always done—put Jim’s body back together while that superficially happy, deeply lonely dark mind was somewhere besides trusted to Leonard’s safekeeping.

Just touching Jim—bloody, wounds gaping, unconscious—had been like a kick to the head, reminding Leonard how much he’d missed him, how much Jim made him laugh when Leonard was such a cantankerous ass without Jim to poke and prod at his thorny demeanor, draw him out and act like a human.

 _At least I let on what’s bothering me when I’m asked,_ he rationalized, holding onto the anger that wanted to waver because Jim was a fucking cliché, the light of his life, all that ridiculous shit. _At least I answer the questions. Not that it makes me feel better—but still, he ought to know he can tell me._

 __“What would it change? If he told you?”

Bleary, drunk eyes, surgeon’s hands steady on his glass no matter how much he drank to try to forget how his damned hands could always patch Jim’s body together again—met blue. Almost impossibly blue, though not quite that crystal-cerulean-azure-whatever blue of his Captain’s. Except it was a woman, hair mixed blonde and silvery grey—but it was the same pointed chin, the same sculpted cheekbones, the same ridiculous lips and long eyelashes. He’s seen older pictures, but he’s never met her before. He’d pretty much decided it was never going to happen—another frustration.

She wasn’t as—something as Jim. It wasn’t about pretty, though she was, of course. It’s—mass and weight, gravity, all that shit. She was a lightweight, compared.

“I’d have expected to find you back at the ship,” Winona Kirk said, voice even and face calm. “Especially given what Nurse Chapel had to say about how badly Jimmy’d been hurt this time.”

“This time.”

He took the last swallow of booze in his glass, the honeyed fire burning harsh in his sinuses from too quick a sip, somehow knowing she’d cut him off if he ordered another. Lord knew what strings Lieutenant Commander Winona Kirk could pull on a station that had just been saved from annihilation by her son, although when the hell did she get here and why?  It's a small damned universe-- or nosy nellies in Starfleet-- that'd send Jim's _mom_ on an errand bringing him parts.

“See, Leonard, I’m calling you Leonard, I don’t think you’d put up with ‘Bones’ from me and in any event I’m not one to mimic my son, this is the point of the night where your thoughts are going straight from your brain to your mouth. I think we’d better get you along, you can come back to the _Hermes_ and sleep—then we’ll talk. I’ll answer whatever questions you have.”

She’d somehow maneuvered herself under his arm and gotten them out into the central walkway without Leonard quite noticing how. Another damned Kirk doing another damned impossible thing.

“Hardly. You’re just more drunk than you think.”

Maybe so—but that didn’t explain why.

“Because he won’t talk to me either. It’s not so much that you deserve to know what he’s hiding as it is that I need to tell someone—and you want to hear.”

More doorways lurch past, and then all of a sudden they’re through the bay of a ‘Fleet high speed courier ship—Mrs. Kirk’s _Hermes_ , no doubt, of which she’s…

“Chief Engineer. Jimmy gets his urge to get greasy and tinker from me. Your Chief Engineer needed parts that are too big to transport.”

And then there’s a room and a bed and it’s dark and thank God it’s got no fucking windows and a thin-fingered hand is brushing hair off his forehead.

“Sleep, Leonard. We’ll talk in the morning.”

He sleeps.

The bed’s too damned big.

\--

He wakes hungover as hell, not knowing quite where he is—but his comm’s not lit up and blinking, and it’s not the _Enterprise_ —or anyone else’s—brig, so he figures he can at least take a shower. By the time he realizes he’s on a ‘Fleet ship, he’s under the sonics, the buzzing sensation both nerve-jangling and soothing with the pounding still going on in his head.

There are clothes on the floor when the door whisks open—a female voice says “I programmed an alert for when you got in the shower,” and yeah, right.

That’s the part he was missing.

Jim’s mother. Apparently Jim got his ridiculous hacking skills from her, too.

He grabs the clothes—science blues, his size—and gets dressed, noting the stubble and weary eyes in the mirror, muddy and dull. Not “ _Spanish moss and swamp cedar_ ” like Jim-- the goddamned romantic-- likes to tease, rather than just saying hazel and calling a damned spade a spade. It smells like coffee when he emerges, and Winona Kirk’s pouring it from a flask into mugs while a full-on farm breakfast takes up the rest of the table.

“Eat first,” she says without a hint of disapprobation. “There’s a hypo with nutrients and analgesics when you’ve finished your coffee.”

He might as well, he figures, and, well, he’s curious. Telling his cliché brain to shut up about cats, he sits—eats—drinks ‘Fleet’s universally execrable coffee, a flavor he’s used to by now. It’s practically home, blonde hair and blue eyes on the other side of the table, long fingers buttering toast lavishly like the word metabolism doesn’t mean a damned thing. Maybe it doesn’t. She’s lean, Winona Kirk is, though maybe he’d say “willowy” to describe her while he’d say “wiry” for Jim. If she always eats like she’s eating now, he’ll have to stop telling Jim he’ll get fat—clearly, he won’t if he’s at all like his mother.

She’s methodical with her eating. She holds her knife and fork the same old-fashioned American way, a complicated dance of fork and knives switching hands when steak and eggs demand cutting—and Leonard unabashedly watches the way that she holds herself, hungry to see—hear—learn—what other history of Jim’s is sitting before him.

Hell, he doesn’t even know how she knows about him, much less how—or why-- she tracked down and found him. Jim never mentions her if he can help it, though Leonard knows that they talk. Sometimes.

He finishes the rest of the coffee, swipes his muffin to sop up the beef juices and yolk on his plate, feels mildly astonished that he managed so much food on this headache—then takes the hypo she’s apparently had in a cargo pocket on the thigh of her pants this whole time. He could grouse about knowing enough to eat to assist the meds with a hangover, but she’s somebody’s mama, no matter what Jim thinks, and Leonard can be polite to a lady when he decides that he wants to.

He’s got his mouth half-open to ask—though he’s not quite sure where to start—when she looks at him with those blue eyes, haunted like Jim’s are when he thinks nobody’s looking.

“I don’t know what exactly is between you and my son—it’s none of my business—but since you’re the only person he voluntarily mentions when we talk, I figure you’re pretty important to him. And since you’re not at his bedside waiting to read him the riot act when he wakes up, I’m guessing that the two of you had some sort of falling out. I don’t need the details,” she says, her right hand dismissing the idea that Leonard should do any talking with a short, chopping motion.

“Just… listen,” she says brusquely.

He does, thought by the end it takes everything in him.

It’s a hell of a story, practically Othello’s “ _round, unvarnish’d tale_ ,” as Jim would probably quote—or maybe it’s a “ _tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing_ ,” at least if the _nothing_ in Winona’s confession—and that’s what it is, though Leonard can't be the one to absolve her—is the _nothing_ of her not listening, not believing, not wanting to believe or engage when a small Jim asked her to stay, told her what happened when she went, begged her not to go.

“I thought he was lying,” she says at one point. “Even though he was never a liar. But he used to make up these fabulous stories, even when he was little and had to lisp around baby teeth about the animals we had at the farm, the adventures the chickens got up to at night when we were sleeping. And … I wanted to think … well … he was a sensitive child. I just imagined he missed me and chalked it all up to that.”

Her face isn’t red from crying, because she hasn’t wept one single tear, nor is it blotchy with shame or self-hate. Instead, that mouth, shaped just like Jim’s, tells this accounting of errors in a measured alto voice with a feminine face, small frown lines and wrinkles in place from the serious mask that’s more translucent than Jim—tenor, masculine, opaque.

Jim pretends to smile, at least.

“But anyway,” she says, and goes on, since there’s more. Of course there is. After Jim’s childhood, it’s no fucking wonder the kid likes Shakespeare so much—they’re mild, happy family stories, compared.

He guesses the details don’t really matter, just like Jim’s mother said when she didn’t want to know what he and Jim were—and the thought of applying the past tense to them makes him even sicker now than it did yesterday—suffice to say that they’re horrid, and it’s only his work’s experience at not losing his lunch at the myriad of disgusting alien plagues and the stench of burned, rotting flesh that keeps his excellent breakfast down.

His mouth dries, speechless as he listens, and none of the water or coffee or juice laid out on the still-full table before him quenches that thirst, the one that’s growing in him.

When she finishes, she makes the first display of real emotion she’s seen—she swipes one shaky hand over her face, rubbing distractedly, as if she has no idea where to start to address facial muscles tired from this—obscene—recitation.

“So,” she says after a moment, words jerked to a halt by some further thought she doesn’t yet know how to express.

“So. Jim stopped asking me things, stopped telling me things, stopped saying anything much at all, even before Sam ran away, and then Sam ran away, and then … well, Frank and Tarsus and everything else. If I got a hundred words out of him between ages thirteen and sixteen when he left for good, well, I’d be overestimating, I’m sure.”

It’s an inept summation. Incomplete, even though Leonard’s sure she’s told him all that she knows, all the devilry and good deeds and horrible things that have ever happened to Jim, actor and acted-upon, and Leonard yearns to know more and yet—it’s already too much.

“And Jim said you could tell me all this…”

She shakes her head, lets out a nervous laugh he’s never heard from his son because Jim’s got this motto—“never let them see you sweat, Bones”—that suddenly means so much more, though of course he always knew, always believed in whatever Jim wasn’t saying. He’s so often wondered what Winona was like, and now that he’s met her, he doesn’t know what to think. He can’t hate her—and he knows Jim doesn’t either, he’s said that much—but maybe it’s best summed up by what little Jim has said to describe their strange—strained—not-quite estranged—relationship. “ _It’s complicated_.”

“He didn’t. He wasn’t awake when I was over there, after my meeting with your Mister Scott. Your Nurse Chapel assured me it was normal…”

Leonard shrugged. “Normal” was shorthand-- bullshit, really-- it was impossible to predict how long Jim was going to be out when given a shitload of sedatives.

“Jim’s not one lost for words, much. Seems like he never stops yapping, sometimes,” Leonard says, and Winona Kirk laughs—a dry, bitter sound, like old oak leaves underfoot.

“Oh, sure. But what does he say?” Winona shakes her head. “He can talk anyone out of or into just about anything, discourse on the latest book that he’s read or math problem someone’s decided needs to be solved, can speak any language he feels like learning—he gives an excellent speech now that he’s decided to be a ‘Fleet Captain, or at least they’re wonderful, how they’re transcribed.” She rubs her eyes with a shaky hand again. “I find it rather hard to watch him on the vidscreen.” She pours them both some more water, then says, “So. I left, didn’t listen, didn’t believe, and as much as he looks like me he looks even more like his father and … well, he’s about as far away from me now as George is, my own fault to start with.”

“Fault’s a complex word,” Leonard manages, though yeah—fault’s in there, somewhere.

“Oh, sure,” she says, laughing again. It’s an empty sound—wind howling, all that poetical shit. “Things happen. Suns die. Romulans go mad. The Captain always goes down with the ship. It’s entropy, some of it, grief, all those clichés that are true anyway.”

She stands—stands in front of him—rubs a callused engineer’s thumb over the frown lines on his forehead—“ _scowly Bones lines_ ,” Jim calls them, does the same thing his mother’s doing right now—and says with cloudy blue eyes, not clear or piercing like Jim’s—“He breaks my heart every time I talk to him, and if I told him, he’d probably stop calling-- he doesn’t want to hurt anybody. But … I wouldn’t miss what little he’ll say for the world.” She smiles. Badly. “He smiles sometimes. Laughs at my jokes.”

She thumbs the lines once again, frowning, looking like one of those doleful Madonnas in one of those churches in Florence. Apropos of nothing and everything all at once, she says “Blue supergiants are the hottest, brightest, heaviest stars in the universe. Small. Rare. Short-lived. Trying to light the whole universe all by themselves.”

“He could have told me,” is what McCoy comes up with in answer. “I would have believed him.”

He’ll give her this much—she doesn’t flinch. The only clue his hit has connected is this quirk at the edge of her mouth.

“What would it change?”

It’s the same question she asked him last night. “I would know… I could tell him not everything’s his fault. Not everything rests on his shoulders.”

She laughs, leaves skittering on pavement in cold autumn wind. “Don’t you already? Doesn’t he already tell you more than he does anyone else?”

“Why did you come track me down?” is what he asks in response.

“Jimmy hasn’t laughed at my jokes in three weeks, and then when you weren’t there when I went to go check on him…” She shrugs. “I’m not much of a mother, but I still have the instinct. Sometimes.” She tips her head—thinks—shrugs again. “Plus, he stopped mentioning you.”

Nurse Chapel has always had excellent timing—Leonard’s comm buzzes with a short message before he has to answer the question.

_“Kirk released to quarters for 24 hrs rest.”_ And he hadn’t been there. He was always there—something Leonard prided himself on, no matter how -- _blue supergiant_ \-- Jim was. He’d told Jim he was as distant as the North Star Jim claimed to mirror in constancy—but he’s been feeling like flotsam ever since he yanked himself free of Jim’s orbit.

When he looks back at Jim’s mother, lord knows what she sees. All she says is “He’ll always make you bleed, Leonard. But isn’t bleeding a sign of life?”

He kisses her once on the cheek—she smells like powder and ice—a white dwarf, maybe—and leaves without saying anything more.

\--

Leonard’s not one for praying or believing in Gods. He’s sentimental and southern, sure, but he’s a scientist, too, and all the proof in the universe still tends toward the truth that life happened by accident, a byproduct of chemical and physical forces—nothing romantic or intended at all about sentient existence. Of course, that never stops him from his mental litany of “ _no, not yet, mine, no_ ,” whenever he’s operating on Jim or otherwise saving his life again because damned if Jim thinks his own has any value, weighed against that of his crew and the people they serve. And the fact that there isn’t a God—or Goddess, or whatever celestial assemblage some beings believe in—doesn’t mean there aren’t things Leonard finds holy. Or sacred. Or that he tries to resanctify with his attention—existence—whatever.

So he walks back to the ship—doesn’t run, it’s undignified and against regs, plus it's just not a good idea in a ‘base just a step down from panic over last week’s invasion.  He notes as he goes all the scorch marks and twisted metal and plastic left over from the attack. The Station’s engineers will repair it, but underneath, that damage will always be there, make the ‘base just that bit more unsound. There’s talk of building a new one, unscathed—but the people who’ve lived here and call this floating metal polis in space _home_ are resisting.

“We’ll stay as long as it lasts. It’s held us together this long,” said the Stationmaster at a meeting Spock had attended, one McCoy had watched on the simulcast because it’d only been an hour since he’d finished operating on Jim. “We don’t want something new. We just want to hold on to what we already have.”

Right.

He breaks into a run once he rounds the corner and turns down the hall to the docking port where _Enterprise_ floats.

\--

His mouth is on Jim’s, his hands on Jim’s shoulders, feet braced wide enough to take Jim’s weight when he hauls him in for a kiss as soon as Jim opens the door to his quarters.

And then he drinks Jim in like he’s water and wine and sunlight and rain, licks and sucks him all over like he’s Leonard’s newborn kit, sanctifies and subsumes and drowns and breathes freely again and all the contradictory shit that’s involved in loving Jim Kirk.

Jim doesn’t ask any questions. He smiles—shyly—blue eyes bright in the dark-- sad look on his face incredibly heavy and yet—yeah—fucking magnetic.

He swallows Jim’s bitter cum, chases the sweet mint of Jim’s toothpaste from the back of his mouth, holds on to himself and Jim steadily, surgeon’s hands never shaking, and if the salt on his tongue isn’t all sweat, Leonard won’t tell because at least Jim let him see this even if he won’t say why he’s crying. And yes—maybe Leonard made Jim cry in the first place, but Jim’s got a sleepy smile on his face now and Leonard’s drunk with the truth that he caused that smile, too.

And this—the afterward part, it’s something that’s holy, always has been. Jim’s as close right now to McCoy as a babe in the womb, the two of them curled on each other, nothing different from a thousand times before.  It's a constant.

“Missed you,” Jim offers, so fucking earnest. Trying. Just like he said. Just like his mother said.

Leonard bleeds a little—and yes, he’s alive. They both are. The blood Jim spills inside Leonard every time he does something quintessentially Jim mingles with Leonard’s own—and with that sharp bit of hurt he realizes he’s no longer thirsty.

“Shut up. You don’t have to say anything,” the doctor replies—and then drinks his fill until Jim laughs, long and full in his—their-- bedroom, and Leonard— _fine_ , Bones—is back in stable orbit once more. Space is disease and danger, wrapped in darkness—sure. But there’s light in the darkness just when it feels like there’ll never be sun.

He won’t forget it again.  



End file.
